Devil's Vortex

He was starting to wonder himself. Abstract knowledge might not load many blasters, it was true. Which was why he’d long since learned—the hard way—to suppress his own lively natural lust for knowledge for its own sake. Staying alive took all the brain power even a man the likes of Ryan Cawdor could bring to bear.

But this was shaping up into a mystery whose answer might well affect their survival.

“Or maybe that dude we chilled killed them all with his ax?” Mildred suggested.

Ryan grunted. “Mebbe,” he said.

“That’d be an irony,” Mildred stated pointedly. “If that guy’s reward for heroically taking out a whole colony full of stickies was for us to blast him out of his socks.”

“Spilled blood won’t go back in the body, Mildred,” Ryan said. “You of all people should know that. Anyway, you might remember he thought we were stickies and was fixing to proceed accordingly.”

“True,” she said.

As Ryan cautiously advanced among the scattered stickie bits with his blaster ready, details of the handful of buildings became apparent. Clearly this had been a farm. Like so many others, buildings seemed to have been thrown together and rudely nailed in place from whatever could be scavvied, traded for or stolen. Planks. Timber scraps. Flattened tin cans. Cracked and sun-discolored plastic sheeting. A few rare chunks of corrugated metal. Sad and sagging but no more than most to be encountered in the Deathlands. And the farm had to have been relatively prosperous, judging by the number of structures.

Ironically, their number and size suggested that this had been a prosperous location. Relatively. A marginally better style of hardscrabble life.

“Looks like a sizable group lived here,” Mildred said. “Normal people, that is.” Stickie colonies could take numerous forms—like the rubbery-skinned little humanoids themselves—from massive piles of rubbish to what looked like outsized wasps’ nests. But never as orderly as this place was.

Even now.

“Might’ve been an extended clan,” Krysty said.

Ryan had seen no sign of norms other than the man he’d helped chill. But as Krysty spoke he saw a little girl lying facedown on the ground. Snow had already half drifted over her. She was clearly dead.

Neither Ryan nor any of the others made a move to examine her more closely. Her rough smock was torn and bloodied on the back. That she’d died by violence told them what they needed to know. And despite all being hardened survivors of years in the Deathlands, none of them wanted to see more horror than they had to. Not even Ryan, and he was reckoned a hard man.

They came across other chills, adults, both men and women. All bore the telltale sign of stickie violence: the red sucker imprints on their flesh left by mutie fingertips that could peel skin from muscle and muscle from bone with their terrible adhesive power. Some bore bite wounds, as well, divots scooped from sides or limbs, throats torn out. Some varieties of stickies lacked external mouths. Others had mouths filled with needle fangs.

These were that second kind. Or had been. Ryan saw a couple more or less intact stickie chills, one with a lower face and throat obliterated by what had to have been a point-blank shotgun blast, another with an ax still embedded in its round head.

“Blasters up, and stay ready, people,” Ryan called softly to his comrades.

A beat later Jak called out from somewhere, lost in the snow-swirl, “Hear something.”

Ryan crouched, handblaster at the ready. Beside him he saw Krysty and Ricky do likewise—the redhead with her full-auto capable 9 mm Glock 18C, the youth with his old Webley revolver, rechambered for .45 ACP.

Then Jak said, “Girl crying.”

Krysty’s pale and beautiful face, which had been an ice sculpture a moment before, softened. She straightened, lowering the boxy muzzle of her blaster.

“Don’t let your guard down, lover,” Ryan growled. “We don’t know it’s not a trap.”

She cocked an incredulous brow at him. “What? A stickie crying out in a little girl’s voice to lure us in?”

“Other muties have been known to do that trick,” J.B. reminded her. “Who knows what stickies might come up with. Some of them are bastard smart.”

Krysty’s other eyebrow arched up to match the first. She nodded. “Good point. But we still need to check. Just carefully.”

“It’s not our problem anyway,” Ryan said. He was talking to the woman’s back as she moved purposefully ahead among the eerie cluster of farm buildings. She had a mind of her own—it was one reason he loved her. And she had as keen a survival sense as he did. After all, she’d met the same brutal and deadly challenges he had across their years together on the Deathlands. Some he even hadn’t, when they were split by circumstance or necessity. She knew what she was doing.

But he also felt concern that her big, soft heart might dull the edge of her wits.

At this point the only thing to do was follow. He heard a rustle and glanced over his shoulder to see J.B. slide in behind him, his M-4000 riot scattergun held slantwise before his hips in patrol position. The little man flashed him a quick grin.

Getting my back, Ryan thought. Automatically. As usual. They were all sharp-eyed and sure shots, and none of them compared to Jak Lauren in the sensory-keenness department. But Ryan just felt better when it was his best friend and right-hand man in particular who was watching their asses. Especially going into an unknown situation.

He grinned to himself. Every situation in this life is unknown, he thought. And forgetting that little fact is one of the best and quickest ways to end up with dirt hitting you in the eyes.

The main structure was one story, big—half a dozen rooms or more. It had a peaked roof to shed snow as it fell. Now the wind was spooling the powdery stuff off its battered galvanized and corrugated metal in swirls and skeins, flinging it at their eyes. A screen door, hanging open and sagging, banged against the frame periodically as it got kicked by vagaries of that killing wind.

But the sobbing was coming from a much smaller side building. Sounds like a kid, Mildred mouthed to Ryan. He nodded.

Jak crouched outside, covering the door with his Colt Python revolver. The albino loved knives and preferred them over blasters. But given what had happened to the farm folk here, if there was a nasty surprise waiting for him in that shed, he wanted to be able to answer it straightaway with a bigger, louder surprise of his own.

And shed it was, Ryan judged. His first glance suggested it might be an outhouse—the cold sucked his sense of smell away, and if the farmers had had sense to lime it, it probably didn’t give off an eye-watering, knee-buckling stink except on the hottest days of a Black Hills summer. But it was too big for a one-holer and not proportioned right for two or three. The structure had to be used for storage, he thought. Mebbe tools.

The door opened outward. It hung invitingly, just a hand span ajar. As he approached, J.B. slid past him, as smooth as an eel.

“Let me,” he said with an upward tip of his shotgun’s barrel.

“Go right ahead,” Ryan said. The 12-gauge was an even bigger surprise than Jak’s .357 Magnum blaster for lurking bad things. Lots of strange predators or scavengers could follow behind a marauding stickie clan. Some of them not even muties.

Standing well clear of the doorway proper, the Armorer reached forward, gingerly grabbed hold of the door, then whipped it open. Neither a lunging feral form nor a blast of blasterfire greeted the sudden movement. Holding the M-4000 leveled from his hip, he sidestepped quickly across the doorway, left to right, staying outside. He wanted to clear the fatal funnel of the door without plunging into a completely unknown environment.

“Easy, little lady,” Ryan heard him say. “We’re not here to hurt you.”

Cautiously Ryan joined his old friend. He saw that J.B. had been right not to do the usual room-clearing drill, stepping quickly inside and then immediately sidestepping left or right out of the doorway, to make a perfect target of himself for as short a time as possible. They were in a toolshed, and the tools were in some disarray, scattered here and there. Had the Armorer driven ahead, he might’ve tangled up his feet and pitched face-foremost onto the packed-dirt floor. Or worse.

A little girl huddled inside, just visible in the gloom of the far side of the crowded little room.

* * *

“HOW’D IT GO, BOSS?” Hammerhand’s chief lieutenant asked as he strode into camp. Joe Takes-Blasters’s big broad face showed a frown of concern. “Reckoned you’d stay at the Crow camp longer.”

“No need,” Hammerhand said.

“So, you decided you didn’t need to go chasing visions after all, eh?” Mindy Farseer asked with her usual half-mocking tone of voice and one eyebrow arched.

“No. I did. I got what I wanted.”

The Blood encampment was a collection of about one hundred “lodges,” tepees of hide or canvas, yurts standing up from carts. It was the standard dwellings of Great Plains nomads. The brutal wind had subsided to a breeze that came and went, snapping their flaps occasionally like little whips. A few skinny children chased one another, sending chickens squawking from their path.

A handful of assorted battered trucks, modified to burn alcohol as fuel, were parked in the center of the camp, along with a selection of motorcycles, from dirt bikes to powerful but stripped-down choppers. Most of their transport took the form of a substantial herd of horses.

Hammerhand thought that they looked like a sorry-ass bunch of draggle-tail coldhearts, not the kind of people with whom he could build an empire.

But he meant to do just that. With them. And this morning he had received a clear and compelling vision of how to accomplish that.